{"id":1957284,"date":"2025-08-13T03:21:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T03:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1957284"},"modified":"2025-08-13T03:21:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T03:21:15","slug":"what-popular-kids-shows-can-teach-you-about-gender-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/what-popular-kids-shows-can-teach-you-about-gender-roles\/","title":{"rendered":"What Popular Kids’ Shows Can Teach You About Gender Roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What your kids see on popular children\u2019s TV programs could teach them lasting lessons about what kind of leaders girls and boys can grow up to be. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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According to a new study in Psychological Science<\/a>, harmful gender biases continue to persist in TV programming for kids. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Researchers analyzed scripts from 98 children\u2019s television programs in the U.S. from 1960 to 2018, including classics like \u201cScooby-Doo, Where Are You!\u201d (1970) and modern shows like \u201cSpongeBob SquarePants\u201d (2002), \u201cDora the Explorer\u201d (2012) and \u201cThe Powerpuff Girls\u201d (2016). <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What they found was that gender stereotypes are at the core of children\u2019s TV content. Troublingly, this pattern has not improved and has, in fact, remained consistent over 60 years. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cGendered patterns in language are a much subtler form of bias \u2014 the part of the iceberg that\u2019s hidden underwater \u2014 one likely to go unnoticed by audiences and creators alike,\u201d the study\u2019s lead author, Andrea Vial, told celebrity.land.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The number of female characters in TV shows and movies has increased considerably, Vial noted, but what female characters on children\u2019s TV shows get to do and say is still sending gendered messages to kids.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even creators with good intentions can perpetuate limiting beliefs about girls\u2019 agency. \u201cThese linguistic biases may seem too subtle to matter. But they do matter, because they quietly shape children\u2019s beliefs about the way the world works,\u201d Vial said. Here\u2019s how. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Female characters get relegated to passive \u201cdone-to\u201d roles.<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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\"Even<\/picture><\/div>\n
Even modern children TV shows in the study communicated subtle but harmful gender biases about how boys and girls should act and lead. <\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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Researchers looked at over 2.7 million sentences in over 6,000 scripted episodes of TV. What they found was that when pronouns like \u201che\u201d and words like \u201cboy\u201d would appear, they would often be in sentences where boys were agents or \u201cdoers.\u201d In scripts, \u201cmale\u201d words were associated with actions of achievement, money, power and reward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For example, the sentence \u201cNever send a boy to do a man\u2019s job\u201d showed up in a 1964 episode of \u201cBewitched\u201d and was coded by researchers to have the agentic category of \u201cjob\u201d co-occurring with male words \u201cboy\u201d and \u201cman.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But when pronouns like \u201cshe\u201d and words like \u201cgirl\u201d appeared, they would be in sentences where female characters were in a passive position.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even shows from the 2000s had notable differences in boys being the \u201cdoers\u201d rather than the \u201cdone-tos,\u201d with shows like \u201cCurious George,\u201d \u201cBoy Meets World,\u201d \u201cDrake and Josh,\u201d \u201cDanny Phantom\u201d and \u201cPhineas and Ferb\u201d being standout examples. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFor these shows, the syntactic male advantage was particularly stark,\u201d Vial said. She noted that when boys are more likely to get seen as \u201cdoers,\u201d this \u201csends kids the message that agency belongs more naturally to boys than to girls, even if no one explicitly intends to send that message.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Gender equity researcher Amy Diehl also said this can teach children to assume harmful stereotypes about girls and boys. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cFrom a young age, children learn by categorizing. This is normal. When they watch television that shows boys generally \u2018doing\u2019 and girls generally being \u2018done to,\u2019 they unconsciously register the pattern,\u201d Diehl said. \u201cIn this case, the pattern is a harmful stereotype, which may lead them to assume that girls are passive and boys are active.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Why has there been so little progress with gender stereotypes in children\u2019s TV?<\/strong> <\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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Diehl said that one reason why there has not been more progress might be due to the writers in the room creating these storylines. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The study looked at TV shows written between 1960 and 2018, and in 2019, a separate Rutgers University study<\/a> found that the people responsible for U.S. and Canadian children\u2019s television content are predominantly men. In the U.S., men are 80% of directors, 71% of show creators, and more than half of writers. Only 18% of episodes were written only by women and only 25% were mixed-gender writing teams. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201c\u2018Mixed-gender\u2019 writing rooms are often dominated by white men with women being numerical tokens, meaning that women can have trouble getting their perspectives heard,\u201d Diehl said. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAlthough women\u2019s place in society has changed a lot … since the 1960s, it\u2019s not surprising that these changes are minimally reflected in the language of children\u2019s media,\u201d Vial said. \u201cIt would take a concerted effort by writers and producers, and attention to subtle linguistic biases like the ones we uncovered, to make meaningful change.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Until this change takes place on screens, parents should be vigilant about monitoring what their children hear from TV. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the study, researchers also found that words related to \u201chome\u201d and \u201cfamily\u201d were more often associated with \u201cfemale\u201d words.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For example, \u201cShe needs to stay in bed for a few days,\u201d from a 2012 episode of \u201cMy Little Pony: Friendship is Magic,\u201d was coded as containing a \u201chome\u201d category co-occurring with a female word (\u201cshe\u201d).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThis is another harmful stereotype that can lead children to assume that men belong in the workplace and women at home,\u201d Diehl said. \u201cParents can interrupt these stereotypes by pointing them out and by seeking out shows that have more diversity in character roles.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Families can also take these lessons offline and teach children to engage with people in non-stereotypical roles, such as by reading books about women in STEM or playing with toys traditionally associated with the opposite gender, Diehl suggested. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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What this study underscores is that even the simple way we structure our sentences when speaking to children can teach limiting ideas about the roles girls and boys should have.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Vial said parents who try hard to teach their children a gender-inclusive outlook are often surprised to find that their kids \u201csomehow still come to endorse gender-biased views and stereotypes. \u2018Where did that come from?\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cAs our study demonstrates, they may be picking it up from a seemingly innocent source: age-appropriate television content that, at first blush, may not even seem biased.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.celebrity.land \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What your kids see on popular children\u2019s TV programs could teach them lasting lessons about what kind of leaders girls and boys can grow up to be. According to a new study in Psychological Science, harmful gender biases continue to persist in TV programming for kids. Researchers analyzed scripts from 98 children\u2019s television programs in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1957285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25174],"tags":[343757,310484,307441,343756,22205],"class_list":["post-1957284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gossip","tag-gender-bias","tag-kids","tag-parenting","tag-stereotypes","tag-television"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/What-Popular-Kids-Shows-Can-Teach-You-About-Gender-Roles.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1957284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1957285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1957284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1957284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1957284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}